Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Imagining what the Web might (not) have become without standards, and you will understand why we all must support an open web platform for the future.

Today marks a significant milestone for a great many of my colleagues around the world with whom I have had the privilege of working within the W3C HTML Working Group. Several of us have taken on new roles and responsibilities, changed companies, launched new businesses, or become parents – or in my case, a grandparent - since I joined the W3C HTML Working Group as a co-chair in 2009. Yet we continued to work as a community to produce the W3C Recommendation announced today for the HTML 5.0 open standard.

As a Co-Chair of the W3C HTML Working Group, I have seen firsthand the remarkable commitment that people and organizations from all over the world have contributed to this effort. It has been an open and intensely collaborative process, encompassing a great many passionate and brilliant minds.

Although many of the HTML5 features standardized today were sketched out several years ago, it took a lot of hard work to get the details right. Since 2007, the Working Group has resolved more than 4,000 errors, ambiguities, and controversies recorded in the WG bug lists. The email archive at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/ shows that it took over 45,000 messages since March 2007 to get the job done!

In recent weeks I contacted around 40 people, a cross section of those who have banged away at, or banged on about, HTML5. I asked them for their perspectives on HTML5 becoming a W3C Recommendation. Below are the words of the 28 people who responded, pretty much in the order they hit my inbox:

This milestone represents many years of commitment from people and organizations around the world to produce and stabilize the next generation of the W3C Open Web Platform. The IE team believes that the standards process is vital to creating an interoperable Web and ensuring that the web just works for everyone.

HTML Guy or not, you have to admit it has changed the way we interact with the web and the world. HTML5 is when we, the internet industry, players and consumers finally grew up a little. The web world is far from perfect, but compared to the past, it's night and day...